


Home Ain't a Place Anymore

by BabylonsFall



Category: Leverage
Genre: Character Study, Eliot Spencer-centric, Established Relationship, Motels on no name highways are weird liminal spaces okay, Multi, Of a sorts, coming home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:42:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28624296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BabylonsFall/pseuds/BabylonsFall
Summary: Eliot's on a trip. And it's too damn long.
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer
Comments: 9
Kudos: 93





	Home Ain't a Place Anymore

**Author's Note:**

> So. Funny story. I apparently wrote this little piece of fluffy nothing back in 2018. I have no memory of this. I found it again by accident while diving through my drive. And I don't know why I didn't post it either.
> 
> Either way! I read it over again and realized it wasn't half bad, so, figured it belonged here finally!
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy!

Eliot wasn’t sure when he started dreading cardboard-stiff mattresses, the smell of stale cleaning products, and the tinny rumble of a busted heater more than being hit in the face.

No, wait. He knew exactly when. It was last night. In his second motel room of the trip. And there he was, in his third, and he was just about ready to break something. Preferably the aforementioned busted heater. Maybe he could kick it into working better. It worked for Hardison’s computers sometimes, why wouldn’t it work for tech likely salvaged from the seventies?

The heater kicked on—a splutter-click that grated on every single one of Eliot’s frayed nerves—just long enough to fill the room with the smell of old air and dust before it died out again. The damn thing was old enough, Eliot wouldn’t be surprised if it had some kind of life to it, and if it spent most of it being as spiteful as a hunk of plastic and metal could be.

And perhaps he was just a touch tired. And frustrated.

Because he could’ve been home by now, if he’d just been allowed to plan this trip his way. He could make the drive in a day, day and a half tops, depending on how well he could avoid anything with a siren. But apparently driving that long ‘wasn’t healthy,’ and ‘insane,’ and ‘it’s not life or death, Eliot, take a break, goddamn!’

So Hardison (and Parker, and Eliot still wasn’t sure when she started agreeing with Hardison on _anything_ concerning driving) had planned out Eliot’s trip. And it had originally included much, much nicer hotels. Which would’ve added hours all four days and Eliot just wasn’t having it, told Hardison he’d find a place off the highway each night and not to worry about it. Not that he’d thought that that would work—and it hadn’t, Hardison had still ended up giving him a list of the possible options based on where he predicted Eliot to stop for the night—but still.

Eliot was kind of regretting it now as the fourth pair of headlights in the last ten minutes cut through the curtains to trace slowly—always slowly, why the hell were they all going five miles an hour?—across the room, a bright streak slicing through the too-dark to be grey, too-light to be black haze that blanketed the room.

What he _really_ wasn’t sure about, and what was far more frustrating, was that he wasn’t sure when all of the annoyances, distractions, and overall... _obnoxious_ little details started getting to him.

He’d spent time in places that made this dim little room seem like a suite at any of Hardison’s fine hotels. He’d gone through trips that had tedious droning down to an artform. This was _nothing_.

But here he was, unable to get comfortable on a too-old and too-hard mattress, curling and uncurling his pressure-fuzzy fingers in the starched blanket, contemplating murdering that goddamn heater, which had the dubious honor of being better than both the previous ones.

He just. He really wanted to be home.

And maybe he did know when shit started getting to him—in situations like this, anyway. Because as Hardison had pointed out when he started this whole mess, this wasn’t life or death. This was just a stretch of travelling to get him back to Portland after he’d flown down to New Orleans to celebrate a buddy’s retirement. There’d been a handful of pings to a couple old cases connected to them, and they’d figured he’d attract less attention driving than in an airport—nothing immediately dangerous, just a bit of healthy caution. Barely on their radar.

But anyway. Yeah, he knew when this started. It was when a hacker and a thief decided to let him stick around—in their apartment, in their bed, in their _life_. Now he had something to get back to. Something better. Something he could hold up and compare all the little discrepancies between what was waiting for him at the end of this trip and where he was now.

The bed wasn’t _bad_ , objectively speaking. But it was missing a furnace that cuddled like an octopus and complained when none of his Doctor Who pajamas were clean, and a blanket hog that was just as likely to lay across them as not and liked to jump on the bed despite Eliot’s continued grumblings.

He’d woken up two days now to the sounds of early morning traffic and housekeeping making their rounds, not someone obnoxiously eating cereal next to him or half-coherent grumblings about it being ‘too damn early.’

(He’d woken up two days now unable to hear two people breathing, safe and sound and tucked close. And he knew, he _knew_ they could take care of themselves. Had been doing so long before he came into the picture. And this was far from the first time they’d been separated for any stretch of time. He wasn’t so dependent, wasn’t so worried, that he _needed_ to check on them first thing in the morning. But it...definitely helped.)

He’d broken out one of the playlists Hardison had made him yesterday around hour five, but the car had still felt too quiet without the constant background back-and-forth that inevitably cropped up between his two better parts. The last one had been about why certain articles of clothing were named after people that Eliot still didn’t know if he followed correctly.

A new playlist had shown up on his phone about hour seven, no title or anything to let him know what he was in for. But he’d put it on, and had had to laugh when it became clear that Parker and Hardison hadn’t been able to agree what would go on it. It seemed to be a nostalgic mix, if he had to guess—bouncing back and forth between Disney soundtracks, a bit of old school R&B and rock, and everything in between. He remembered the Disney marathon they’d had, a year back, when Parker told them that she’d seen The Little Mermaid and Peter Pan, and none of the others. And he remembered Hardison talking about how Nana used to love putting on her albums from Aretha Franklin and Etta James and dancing around the house with the younger kids sometimes, dragging in the older kids when it became obvious they wanted to too but were too ‘cool’ for it.

And maybe that playlist was put on repeat for awhile.

Point was.

He had somewhere to be. And that somewhere was _not_ in this little hole of a motel.

...Hardison was going to kill him.

* * *

He was in the car—on some back highway that paralleled a main, empty road stretched out on either side, the sky still heavy and dark and star-studded—in the next half hour.

* * *

He’s home a good twelve hours early.

Hardison is _not_ happy with him. Or, at least, he says he isn’t. The way he greets Eliot at the door with a warm kiss that feels like _home_ says differently. The way he wraps an arm around Eliot’s waist and only moves to the side to let Parker near tackle the both of them with her own ‘welcome home’—an electric kiss and a bone-crushing hug that settles him, that _grounds_ him for the first time in a week included—says differently.

“Next time, I’m driving the day.” Eliot starts, trying for frustrated and missing by a mile. Hardison laughs at him but doesn’t argue, while Parker snorts.

He doesn’t drive the day next time. But he is down to two days instead of four, so he’ll take it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 💛


End file.
